The COVID-19 pandemic

[tomh009]

B.1.617 - a variant responsible for the incredible surge in cases and deaths in India (314'835 cases today!) - has been found in both Vancouver and Quebec. The alarming thing is that the patient in Quebec was vaccinated back in January.

The vaccine does not provide 100% protection against infection. Protection against symptomatic infection is somewhere in the 80-90% range given the confidence intervals on the various vaccines. Protection against severe infection (requiring hospitalization) has been pretty close to 100% in the real world, though, based on data from the UK and Israel.

So, my question is, how severe were the symptoms for this person?

[tomh009]

Waterloo Region is identifying about 37% of the new cases as variants (for the past week). This is significantly lower than the GTA, and likely explains why our R-value is hovering around 1.0 and their numbers are exploding.

That would be a reasonable explanation, but is the denominator all screened cases or all cases? Seems like PHO had a change in that recently.

This is of the screened cases, assuming I understood the description correctly: it's sampling, essentially.

The percentage of screened samples has been increasing, too.

[tomh009]

THURSDAY 2021-04-22

Waterloo Region reported 78 new cases for today (12.9% of the active cases) and two more for yesterday for a total of 69; 585 new cases for the week (+19), averaging 13.3% of active cases. 599 active cases, -43 in the last seven days.

Next testing report on Friday.
5,444 doses of vaccine administered, with a seven-day average of 4,105. At this pace, the dose count will reach 70% of the provincial population on 2021-06-25 (-4 days).

Ontario reported 3,682 new cases today with a seven-day average of 4,176 (-151). 4,597 recoveries and 40 deaths translated to a decrease of 955 active cases and a new total of 41,962. +3,621 active cases for the week and 190 deaths (27 per day). 54,246 tests for a positivity rate of 6.79%. The positivity rate is averaging 8.13% for the past seven days, compared to 7.68% for the preceding seven.

757 patients in ICU (-33 today, +98 for the week) and a total of 2,350 patients hospitalized (+418 for the week).

134,920 doses of vaccine administered, with a seven-day average of 105,485. At this pace, the dose count will reach 70% of the provincial population on 2021-06-15 (-2 days). The regional completion date currently lags the provincial one by 10 days (-2 today).

• 436 cases in York: 39.3 per 100K
  
• 1,131 cases in Toronto: 38.6 per 100K
  
• 165 cases in Niagara: 36.8 per 100K
  
• 507 cases in Peel: 36.7 per 100K
  
• 64 cases in Eastern Ontario: 31.6 per 100K
  
• 200 cases in Durham: 31.0 per 100K
  
• 279 cases in Ottawa: 28.0 per 100K
  
• 38 cases in Brant: 27.9 per 100K
  
• 113 cases in Middlesex-London: 27.9 per 100K
  
• 144 cases in Hamilton: 24.9 per 100K
  
• 129 cases in Halton: 23.5 per 100K
  
• 46 cases in Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph: 16.9 per 100K
  
• 14 cases in Northwestern: 16.0 per 100K
  
• 95 cases in Waterloo: 15.4 per 100K (based on provincial reporting)
  
• 69 cases in Simcoe-Muskoka: 12.8 per 100K
  
• 16 cases in Lambton: 12.2 per 100K
  
• 47 cases in Windsor-Essex: 12.1 per 100K
  
• 24 cases in Southwestern Ontario: 12.0 per 100K
  
• 10 cases in Leeds, Grenville & Lanark: 5.9 per 100K
  
• 5 cases in Huron Perth: 5.1 per 100K
  
• 7 cases in Thunder Bay: 4.7 per 100K
  
• 16 cases in Sudbury: 4.1 per 100K
  
• 8 cases in Kingston Frontenac: 3.9 per 100K
  
• 3 cases in Chatham-Kent: 2.8 per 100K
  

Only regions with at least two cases per 100,000 population

[Rainrider22]

As a participant of judicial process, I could never champion for that idea...

[ac3r]

Canada has banned flights from India and Pakistan for 30 days to ward off spread of the new Indian variant.

[tomh009]

Canada has banned flights from India and Pakistan for 30 days to ward off spread of the new Indian variant.

It's the wrong way to do it. This is the populist option.

The reality is that anyone coming from India can connect in another country. And people from other countries still carry this variant. Better quarantine measures would have more impact.

Sigh.

[ijmorlan]

I don't think we need to do that, I just think we need an actual quarantine.

Like people who choose to ignore it, should be arrested and held for the quarantine period. And the fines should be an order of magnitude higher than the cost of quarantining. And there should be no "fly into Buffalo and drive across" loophole.

This seems very straight forward.

Please tell me you arent serious about having people arrested ???  I cant believe anyone would agree with this...

I can’t believe that anybody would think there is any point at all in a quarantine which is unenforced. What next, people shouldn’t be arrested if they drive drunk, beat somebody up on the street, or dump pollution into a creek?

Yes, we do have the right, through our duly and democratically elected government, to use force to prevent members of our society from harming the rest of us.

[danbrotherston]

As a participant of judicial process, I could never champion for that idea...

Can you give more insight into why?

Do you not feel that violating quarantine should be a crime? Do you not feel that crime should be punished with a short period of incarceration?

To you, why is such an action different than other crimes?

[plam]

No wonder we’re not making much progress on climate change. Covid and its associated mortality is all around us — the result of our collective behaviour is happening now, not years from now — and yet there are still many denialists. How much easier to be a denialist about something whose worst results are still in the future and where it takes more knowledge to understand the connection between action and result.

Depends on what people are exposed to. I think denialists aren't seeing, or are using motivated reasoning, to ignore facts that are clearly in front of them. Media has a large role to play here.

B.1.617 - a variant responsible for the incredible surge in cases and deaths in India (314'835 cases today!) - has been found in both Vancouver and Quebec. The alarming thing is that the patient in Quebec was vaccinated back in January. We'll have to see how that impacts vaccinations across the board. The Prime Minister is considering severely limiting flights in from India, which if required I hope he would do even if it might be political suicide for the Liberal Party. That said, if it's already being detected in two provinces, I imagine it's out in the wild and there would be no containing it at this point.

Let's talk about containing it. There certainly can be containing something that's out there, with sufficiently good measures. We could have contained B117 even when there were some (but more than 0) cases. It's just harder. It's not clear that B1617 is actually more transmissible; its superpower seems to be reinfecting people, which is an issue in India but much less so in Canada. And having mandatory quarantine helps with not continuing to import it.

I can't believe that folks wouldn't agree with this. Yes, we need to get community transmission in check. But look at the freedoms that Australia and NZ enjoy right now. Why would anyone NOT want that?!

Want pictures? It's pretty great. People have even been flying between Australia and New Zealand as of this week. The Australian foreign minister came for a visit yesterday, and the PM is supposed to come in a few weeks.

The vaccine does not provide 100% protection against infection. Protection against symptomatic infection is somewhere in the 80-90% range given the confidence intervals on the various vaccines. Protection against severe infection (requiring hospitalization) has been pretty close to 100% in the real world, though, based on data from the UK and Israel.

So, my question is, how severe were the symptoms for this person?

Yes. Alas, severity of symptoms is not in the public domain probably. It's likely that the vaccine reduces transmission (because fewer viral particles emitted) as well. There was a nursing home case in the US where a vaccinated resident died of COVID-19, but that should be quite rare (and is a worst-case situation).

This is of the screened cases, assuming I understood the description correctly: it's sampling, essentially.

The percentage of screened samples has been increasing, too.

Thanks! Yes, lack of B117 is surely helping Waterloo, which hasn't been doing the whole rocket thing as much as Toronto. And the stay-at-home order probably helps witht hat.

As a participant of judicial process, I could never champion for that idea...

I don't think it should even get to the judicial process stage. You get off the plane and you are escorted to a quarantine facility. Handling people returning by car needs something similar as well. It's expensive (the NZ hotel stay probably costs the government like $5k/2 weeks) but cheaper than COVID.

[ijmorlan]

As a participant of judicial process, I could never champion for that idea...

Do you not feel that crime should be punished with a short period of incarceration?

Little note: at least part of the being arrested part of what we’re talking about isn’t a punishment at all; it’s just quarantine enforcement.

What I mean is, if we discover somebody has violated quarantine and they are sentenced to a prison sentence, that’s punishment; if we discover that they have violated quarantine and put them back in quarantine behind a locked and guarded door until they meet the conditions to exit quarantine, that’s not actually a punishment, it’s just forcing them to observe quarantine.

This is similar to the idea which the legal system doesn’t seem to understand that a fraud artist being required to reimburse their victims is not a punishment, and should be absolutely automatic (and not dischargable in bankruptcy); if they’re required to pay additional money to the victims and/or the government then that would be punishment.

I have no idea what the punishment for violating quarantine should be; I’m not a big fan of punishment-oriented justice or discipline regimes, but that’s what most of our current justice system is and it’s hard to move away from that. So I don’t have a firm opinion on what the penalty, if any, should be.

On the other hand, it’s absolutely clear that an unenforced quarantine is meaningless, so anybody who violates quarantine should definitely be put back in quarantine and kept there using whatever force is required. To argue otherwise is to argue that we don’t have the right to protect ourselves using quarantine.

[ac3r]

GRH will be taking in another wave of out of region Covid-19 patients soon. While I can't confirm 100% on the specifics, I've been told the surgery unit at the downtown hospital site is being prepped to treat non-critical patients and that work is being done on an additional unit (I forget which one) to transform it into ICU space. It definitely seems like our hospitals are beginning to get overwhelmed (though not yet at the point where we are doing extreme triage situations) since the numbers in Hamilton, Niagara, Peel etc are not falling unlike the majority of other regions.

I took the LRT home tonight, going from Uptown to Fairway, and I counted 6 people get on without masks, shoveling food into their faces, chatting to each other or talking on the phone. I really wish the region could hire a couple people to just ride the LRVs back and forth all day making sure people have them on. I ride the bus a lot and find passengers are a lot more compliant and I imagine that's due to the fact they have to walk past the driver first, where the LRT drivers are sitting in a sealed glass chamber, fairly oblivious to what is happening in the train.

[danbrotherston]

GRH will be taking in another wave of out of region Covid-19 patients soon. While I can't confirm 100% on the specifics, I've been told the surgery unit at the downtown hospital site is being prepped to treat non-critical patients and that work is being done on an additional unit (I forget which one) to transform it into ICU space. It definitely seems like our hospitals are beginning to get overwhelmed (though not yet at the point where we are doing extreme triage situations) since the numbers in Hamilton, Niagara, Peel etc are not falling unlike the majority of other regions.

I took the LRT home tonight, going from Uptown to Fairway, and I counted 6 people get on without masks, shoveling food into their faces, chatting to each other or talking on the phone. I really wish the region could hire a couple people to just ride the LRVs back and forth all day making sure people have them on. I ride the bus a lot and find passengers are a lot more compliant and I imagine that's due to the fact they have to walk past the driver first, where the LRT drivers are sitting in a sealed glass chamber, fairly oblivious to what is happening in the train.

We already have those folks...I STILL see fare enforcement officers riding, and I totally would not be surprised if they are not enforcing masks.

[tomh009]

We already have those folks...I STILL see fare enforcement officers riding, and I totally would not be surprised if they are not enforcing masks.

Apparently they are enforcing masks ... a few days ago I overheard a (potentially) homeless person explaining how he got ticketed on the LRT for not wearing a mask.

[nms]

The original dateline for the article is April 2, 2020 so at least some of the data has been public for more than a year.

Highlights from the local data, as reported by Waterloo Region Public Health on April 21, 2021 at 1:30pm:
50.0% of local cases are connected to the workplace
27.8% are connected to schools
8.3% are connected to licensed child care
8.3% are connected to congregate settings
2.8% are connected to hospitals
2.8% are connected  to LTC/Retirement Homes
0% are connected to independent living
0% are connected to universities

This one looks like it's based on 36 cases. It's be nice to have at least a weekly average. Do you know where to find the source data? It's not here:
https://www.regionofwaterloo.ca/en/healt...egion.aspx

[nms]

This one looks like it's based on 36 cases. It's be nice to have at least a weekly average. Do you know where to find the source data? It's not here:
https://www.regionofwaterloo.ca/en/healt...egion.aspx

For whatever reason, my previous post did not load properly.

On Thursday, the CBC reported 37 out of town cases.

On Thursday afternoon, area hospitals reported 37 patients have been brought in from other parts of the province.

As of 12 a.m. Thursday:

St. Mary's General Hospital in Kitchener had 16 COVID-positive patients with nine in the ICU and seven in acute care. The hospital has had seven patients from outside the region.
Grand River Hospital in Kitchener has 18 COVID-positive patients with 12 people in the ICU and six in other areas of the hospital. The hospital has had 18 patients transfer from outside the region.
Cambridge Memorial Hospital has 22 COVID-positive patients with 12 people in the ICU and 10 in acute care. The hospital has had 12 patients transfer from outside the region.